Although I'm no expert on p2p, I have tried out quite a couple of programs,
starting from my first and greatest love Napster to my nowadays favorite Kazaa
Lite. Many filesharing clients have come down the way since Napster and I would
like to compare the two most-hyped in this writeup.
Kazaa Lite is a spyware-free and improved version of the well known
Morpheus look-alike Kazaa, which offers a great deal of options, like
downloading different filetypes such as audio, video and image files. It also
comes in handy if you need software. The program offers downloading from
multiple sources and is quite fast when downloading popular files.
Advantages: Wide range of files rather easy to find. Tools like the
Speed Up - Tool from Kazaa Lite make it fast, given there are enough sources.
What sucks about it: Downloading from only one source can be a total
lamer. There are too few high quality .mp3 files available because the normal
version of kazaa doesn't support any bitrate higher than 128 kb. It is not
possible to download .zip, .rar or .ace files, they have to be set as
self-unpacking archive before.
Overnet is the legitimate son of the much-hyped eDonkey2000, which
allowed to connect to user-hosted servers and download from them. The Overnet
client improves that in searching the whole network and downloading from every
user in eDonkey or Overnet.
Advantages: Many websites offer links that will queue a file they
offer there in your eDonkey2000/Overnet client. sharereactor.com for example has
a great deal of files you can't find anywhere else.
What sucks about it: Perhaps it's just me, but the current version of
Overnet is just so slow. This may be related to the fact that it hasn't as many
users as kazaa has, and there for fewer sources, but the speed really sucks.
My suggestion is to use kazaa for everyday-downloading of music and software,
Overnet for the movies you can't find on kazaa.